ausekilis sends us to DarkReading for the news that auditors have identified thousands of vulnerabilities in the FAA’s Web-based air traffic control applications — 763 of them high-risk. Here is the report on the Department of Transportation site (PDF). “And the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization, which heads up ATC operations, received more than 800 security incident alerts in fiscal 2008, but still had not fixed 17 percent of the flaws that caused them, ‘including critical incidents in which hackers may have taken over control of ATO computers,’ the report says. … While the number of serious flaws in the FAA’s apps appears to be staggering, Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, says the rate is actually in line with the average number of bugs his security firm finds in most Web applications. … Auditors were able to hack their way through the Web apps to get to data on the Web application and ATC servers, including the FAA’s Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure system, Juneau Aviation Weather System, and the Albuquerque Air Traffic Control Tower. They also were able to gain entry into an ATC system that monitors power, according to the report. Another vulnerability in the FAA’s Traffic Flow Management Infrastructure leaves related applications open to malware injection.”

An anonymous reader writes “From The Washington Post’s Security Fix blog comes a tale that should make any Windows home user or system admin cringe. It seems the latest version of the Zeus Trojan ships with a command that will tell all infected systems to self-destruct. From the piece: ‘Most security experts will tell you that while this so-called “nuclear option” is an available feature in some malware, it is hardly ever used. Disabling infected systems is counterproductive for attackers, who generally focus on hoovering as much personal and financial data as they can from the PCs they control. But try telling that to Roman Hüssy, a 21-year-old Swiss information technology expert, who last month witnessed a collection of more than 100,000 hacked Microsoft Windows systems tearing themselves apart at the command of their cyber criminal overlords.'”

The Torpig botnet was hijacked by the good guys for ten days earlier this year before its controllers issued an update and took the botnet back. During that time, however, researchers were able to gain a glimpse into the kind of information the botnet gathers as well as the behavior of Internet users who are prone to malware infections.

An anonymous reader notes that this weekend, ReadWriteWeb discovered a security hole on several McAfee sites, which lets any attacker piggyback on the company’s reputation and brand in order to distribute malware, Trojans, or anything else. The submitter adds an ironic coda to McAfee’s epic fail: “In the ‘how to HTML Injection’ section, the author provided the four steps needed to execute a simple, no-brainer injection, but unfortunately, exposed a hole in NY Times website when they republished the article. While the author changed the offending text to an image, the Times is still using the original story which redirects directly to ReadWriteWeb [via XSS].” From the RWW post: “During tests this weekend, we discovered the company who claims to ‘keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud…’ has several cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and provides the bad guys with a brilliant — albeit ironic — launching pad from which to unleash their attacks.”

Slatterz writes “All this panic over a strain of flu got these people thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world. This list of the top ten worst viruses includes some interesting trivia, including ARPANET’s Creeper virus in 1971, how early attempts at copy protection resulted in Brain, and MyDoom’s denial of service attack on SCO.”

jchrisos writes “Microsoft is planning to disable autorun in the next Release Candidate of Windows 7 and future updates to Windows XP and Vista. In order to maintain a ‘balance between security and usability’, non-writable media will maintain its current behavior however. In any case, if it means no more autorun on flash drives, removable hard drives and network shares, that is definitely a step in the right direction. Will be interesting to see what malware creators do to get around this …”

CWmike writes “Criminal cybergangs must be harried, hounded and hunted until they’re driven out of business, a noted botnet researcher said as he prepared to pitch a new anti-malware strategy at the RSA Conference in SF. ‘We need a new approach to fighting cybercrime,’ said Joe Stewart, director of SecureWorks’ counterthreat unit. ‘What we’re doing now is not making a significant dent.’ He said teams of paid security researchers should set up like a police department’s major crimes unit or a military special operations team, perhaps infiltrating the botnet group and employing a spectrum of disruptive tactics. Stewart cited last November’s takedown of McColo as one success story. Another is the Conficker Working Group. ‘Criminals are operating with the same risk-effort-reward model of legitimate businesses,’ said Stewart. ‘If we really want to dissuade them, we have to attack all three of those. Only then can we disrupt their business.'”